It’s zombie appreciation day today, or as some in the gift card industry like to call it, Valentine’s Day. There is about a million different ways to say I love you. About 999,900 of them have been manufactured by Hallmark and DeBeers. I wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t called a holiday. The only holiness associated with today is the gaping wound of someone’s heart shot through with all manner of lies about the opposite sex. When they tell you love is a rose, what they really mean is that it’s a 15% drop in your bank balance, because roses are effing expensive.
One is often tempted to mock the poltroons who profess an affinity for romantic gestures. To be reminded of one’s own personal Valentine’s wasteland is a tragedy. To make light of the emptiness inside one’s own heart and soul is either comedy gold or a fool’s errand, designed to mask the pain of isolation and loneliness with a bitter and villifying phrase of contempt. So it is with deep and utter mistrust of my ability not to make a sap of myself on this day of days, I will embark on a journey of self, to analyze whether I am a bitter soul stewing in the juices of my unspiced love roast, a weary and deadened romantic ghost wandering the plains of infinite pain and braving the scalding wind blasts of loneliness, or simply a single and moderately happy humourist with an overdeveloped antipathy for saccharine romantic interludes in an otherwise amourousless work-a-day world.
Firstly, one must investigate one’s personal proclivities toward one’s gender of choice. In my case, the inamorata in my life are all as yet unspecified and unmet, hopeful dreams of some future in which the prospect of love is more a matter of course than an exciting adventure in which one’s boat is equally liable to sail off the edge into oblivion as to safely arrive at its port of call. I myself am no fan of either boat trips or long-winded affairs, finding both to be nausea inducing journeys in which Zen maxims regarding destinations have neither place nor substance. In my own experience, love is no different than eating an exotic food in some foreign clime. One is never sure whether the exercise will result in the excessive release of noxious bodily odors and sounds, or a sublime satisfaction in which all the troubles of a far off Middle East seem to melt away in the pleasant afterglow of a meal fit for the gods.
Not that I’m against food of that ilk. It can be an invigorating experience once in a while. Just don’t drink the local water.
Though I must admit that I have had a few choice crushes in my time, and one that turned serious before falling down the deep well of the inevitable. Am I embittered and angry? Well, possibly. But not because of love. Love makes the world go ’round, when gravity loses interest and solar pathways grow unkempt from overuse.
In my opinion, True Love is like money: you never seem to have enough of it, and when you do have it, it is gone all too quickly. The only way to make it last is to invest in something longterm. Even that is a risk, a leap of faith that can make or break you. When she finally leaves, taking the jewelry, china, antique Chesterfield, and your pet monkey, you have no choice but to evaluate the situation.
Valentines Day is a blinding of oneself to all the risks and fears of love, of falling in love, and of the absurd ways in which love makes fools of us all. Do we take the plunge and experience the deep, frothing sensation of 10,000 years of humankind’s most noble, and at the same time most disheartening (no pun intended) practice? Or do we open our eyes and look for the con?
As a matter of self-evaluation in this particular matter, I must admit to being jaded to the point of numbness. Love is a manufactured product now, and all the right feelings are scripted. The expectation that Valentines Day produces in us all is that action follows action, reciprocation is the rote response, and emotions are disguises for banality.
What if love was a dandelion, instead of a rose? What if love was simply staying on the docks instead of leaping over the edge onto the boat heading into the deep empty waste of the ocean blue? What if love wasn’t predicated on cards and candy, but instead subsisted of half-empty milk containers and poorly cooked pasta and a drive to the recycle place? What if love just was, instead of grown and contained and sold in trademarked mall storefronts?
The romantic in me wants a beautiful Valentine’s Day. The cynic in me fears the notion. Maybe it’s why I’m single.